"Post" Tells Black Women to Date White or Die Alone

If mainstream media is to believed, all black women should just throw in the romantic towel today, because unless we're willing to "settle" for a non-black man, we're all ending up alone anyway. That's what seems to be the message of a new dating tome, Don't Bring Home a White Boy: And Other Notions That Keep Black Women From Dating Out, by Karyn Langhorne Folan, who was profiled in The Washington Post.

The fact that Folan, a black woman who has married both black and white men, felt the need to evangelize on behalf of interracial relationships is one thing; the fact that The Post thought it was exceptionally newsworthy is a whole sordid other. I am so sick of reading news articles, blogs, and statistics about educated but desperately single black women. I am sick of media types prescribing surface-level solutions to the so-called man shortage (always: "Go get a white man"). Even more, I am sick of the perception that black women date white men only because they couldn't find a black one.

The idea that black women need to be re-programmed is a popular theme in these kind of diatribes. "Consider your options," says Folan. "Expand your horizons. Stop listening to your girlfriends. Forget about the brothers calling you a sellout," writes The Post. There's nothing wrong with black women that do prefer to date within their ethnicity, and insinuating that they're misguided spinsters with narrow horizons, destined to be alone forever is not only untruthful, but sexist and racist. Similar to the "Why don't you take what you can get?" debate currently being waged against single women of all races, it writes off black men as non-viable options and encourages women who are obviously not open to interracial dating to do so or risk being alone. I mean, if these women wanted to date interracially, they'd be doing it already.

Viewing white men as the last resort is equally unfair, to both black women and white men, but factors heavily into these types of trend pieces. For example, in Folan's list of nine notions that supposedly keep black women out of the arms of waiting white men is this, " #4: I don't find white men attractive." Now, I know that's a pretty limited statement since there is no one "white man look," and unless you've met every single white man on the planet, you can't write off the entire group.

However, if you feel strongly about having a racial preference, is this author's vast knowledge going to push you away from black men? Apparently she's an expert since she left a self-proclaimed "devastatingly handsome" black man for an Irish bloke that she admitted was not a looker. In fact, she described her husband as looking "older than the 50 he claimed to be" and not seeming like "the kind of white guy I could be physically attracted to." Now, they're married with kids. How's that for a second-place fairy tale ending?

It's infuriating that black women's relationships (and those of women in general) are now public domain. I don't believe that our love lives require a solution, and if I did that solution certainly wouldn't need to be blasted across the pages of The Post for the world to dissect. We're not freak anthropological creatures from the planet Lonely and we don't need our perceived problems magnified.

Photo credit: CG2_SoulArtist